Discussion: Extended Live Server Maintenance - Thursday, September 22, 2011

dang i dont like it either. but hey if that is what it takes to get the game and servers working alot better, im all for it.

I thought they JUST UPGRADED the hardware. No? Then what were they doing while they said they were?

Eh. I work all day.

Hah, There goes my work day entertainment! Now I'll have to go back to the olden days of actually doing my job!

So unfair.

There has been a lot of downtime of late, But then, a lot of very big changes have been happening, so I guess I can understand that. Anything that makes the game better in the long run, I can put up with a little annoyance in the now for.

Good luck and God Speed you crazy Server poking fools!

Players! Remember this was expected with the new Freedom version and sometimes doing a backup > shutdown > upgrade > restore > dry run, can take a LONG time. And with some of the crazy people in CoH, like me if I had the money, the bonus they no doubt got from people spending $300+ this month might have forced the devs to upgrade earlier than expected.

This is still kinda a beta really it's just live for the paying people and I REALLY wanted this version but I expected TONS of downtime since running a 7 year old MMO isn't a small amount of data, especially with all the altoholics (me again) out there.

Granted maybe some people are upset with all this new stuff with the downtime, but really it's gotten me to pick up the area around my desk and was it needed!

Keep up the work devs, seeing long down time, to me, means work is getting done and I see my money being used.

This is how many times in a week the game's been down for an extended period of time? Cripes. I understand stuff happens but this is getting to be ridiculous.

With all due respect to the folks who play this game outside of NA I think under ordinary circumstances it's at least understandable why most maintenance periods are going to happen during the "daylight" hours of NA.

But having said that I think it's fairly reasonable that once in a while (especially for a maintenance period that's going to last 12 hours anyway) they ought do a period that takes place during a "non-standard" time. For instance how much worse would it have been for them to have scheduled a 9:30PM BST to 9:30AM BST period this time around? It's still going to suck for a solid 12 hours regardless of what time of day that is.

Obviously most of the people who play this game live in NA so most of the time the maintenance periods are going to favor NA players. But even as a NA player I think it would only be fair for me to get hit by a few of these prime-time downages from time to time.

Fair is fair after all...

No offense to the EU players, but you do realise that Paragon Studios is based in the U.S., not in the EU, hence why the downtimes line up more with the NA work days, rather than the EU. If they were based in the EU, the same thing would be happening to the NA players rather than the EU players. That all being said, this head start 'is' effectively a huge open beta, as CoX freedom still doesnt allow in F2P and premiums, and only VIPs. Hence all the downtimes as of late. Kinda a bad idea in some aspects, but i know there have been alot of people buying stuff on the paragon market lately, and as such Paragon probably has had a big influx of cash to spend on new server shinyness for us to be happy about once the maintenance is over. Just my two cents, beat me down if ya want i guess >.>

So, a 12 hour downtime window, but they're actually physically relocating the servers?

Right, soo... See you all in about 48 hours then (and that's being optimistic).

For me Thursdays are the best days for maintenance but that's because I have my radio show on Thursday evening...guess I'm lucky.

But it sucks for all the other players that are effected by this ridiculously chosen schedule.

As excuses go, I think "Moving the servers. Yes, the physical ones" is a pretty good excuse

Then again, I have Gears 3 and Space Marine to keep me busy, along with nutty housemates. So, I'm sure I'll live

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

We certainly understand frustration with extended downtime, which is a reason we're starting this maintenance at 3:30 AM Central/1:30 AM Pacific/9:30 AM BST as opposed to our normal time of 6:30 AM Central. We will have staff working to support this, and continually monitoring once we bring the servers back online.

Another thing to consider is that as OCR, we never give you the estimate that Ops/Publishing/Engineering/Whatever gives us. We *always* significantly pad our estimates with additional time. So there is a chance the servers will be back online prior to what we estimated (there's also a chance it could go longer...that's just how these things work). With hardware upgrades, especially significant ones, we cannot rush things.

I understand there's been a more than the usual amount of maintenance for the last month or so. We've got a pretty significant change happening right now and we need to be sure that the servers can handle a huge influx of players; Not just for the Free players, but for *everyone*. It's important to us that your in game experience isn't going to be hugely impacted on a performance level when we open the doors to returning and free players, and as such we are making the necessary investments, such as hardware upgrades, to do everything within our power to ensure as much.

Thank you for bearing with us, thank you for your understanding and thank you for your continuing support.